The High West Bourye 2016 Limited Edition

750 ml Booyah! Boorah! bottle

Tasting notes:This noses up galactically. I find the nougat of the world’s best Milky Way bar. Then there’s deep fudge notes, as if the piccolo part of the Star Spangled Banner were played by a baritone saxophone quartet. Consider the thoughts of the new intern, after dark, locked inside the locksmith’s shop. Donning elk hide slippers to wait for dawn, he turns to roast philosophical chestnuts in the fires of his mind. There’s also a walnut bowl rubbed down with gun oil and filled with fermenting cherries. On the nose, that is, not in the shop. Unfortunately, Duane’s only meal tonight will be taken from the moveable feast of memory.

The mouth is suave but strong. In this way it reminds me of Sean Connery during the period of … his entire career, now that I think of it. I wonder, with the intern, whether I can separate the bour from the rye? Can such a mereological task be undertaken? Or would it be nothing less than pulling the sword from the stone, so well matched are they? But if pressed, I’m tempted to say that the bourbon gives it a coffee milkshake aspect, rich and fatty, with the rye doing the work of the chicory-foam topper into which a Cheshire Cat grin was traced. But working the other way round, my tongue reports a vision of vortices of rye, like those kicked up by a runner in the salt flats of Uyuni. Ankle-high swirls, each in the shape of an impossible object, as if Descartes’ evil genius were blowing smoke rings.

The finish runs from bitter rue and yarrow root to sweet caramel and back again. It is Achilles in the stadion, his race unending–but not because of the infinitude of midpoints that he must pass, but because the six-second Vine video is auto-looped. Were he ever to finish and accept his prize, his heaving shoulders would support a spice garland composed of dandelion greens, beet blossoms, wild bachelor’s buttons, cornflower, and hendibeh. To be sure, there’s bright heat like a bishop’s crown pepper-infused white vinegar. But there’s also the soothing warmth of clean laundry, fresh from the dryer, dropped into a cherrywood basket. Through it all, an unending wholeness of parts and their parts, like Moebius’ daughter’s ponytail after M.C. Escher braids her hair.

Rating:

On the scale of mereological terms of art–

The High West Bourye 2016 Limited Edition is “gunk,” a whole comprised of parts which themselves have parts–The very conceptual possibility of such atomless divisibility is thought to refute mereological nihilism. I say to you, however, that the very practical reality of this whiskey is a perfect tonic for long dark night’s of the soul.